From Virginia to New York, observers described
bright lights in the sky and a boom Monday evening around 6pm. Variously
described by watchers as: a bright yellow streak moved rapidly across the
sky, trailed by a plume of white smoke; like a plane engulfed in flames;
a big red ball in the sky. Less than a minute after the fireball was gone,
they said, came a loud boom that shook windows. ''It almost sounded like
when you're at the fireworks and they send out the one to just kind of
make noise,'' an observer said.

“I don’t think it was a meteor shower,” says Tim
McCoy, meteorite curator at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.
He describes showers as the burning up of a dust trail from comets, and
Monday’s event was brief and apparently the result of a single object.
Also, McCoy says, since meteor showers derive from comets they are “highly
predictable.” This event was certainly unexpected.

Alexander Wolszczan, an astronomy professor at
Pennsylvania State University, told the Associated Press that the shaking
people felt and the boom they heard could have resulted from a sound wave
produced by a meteor breaking apart in the atmosphere. A meteor shower
is normally a silent event, he said, but large meteors can create concussive
sound waves, or sonic booms, that can be heard up to 100 miles from an
object's path.

The most extreme reports about the meteorite’s
splashy entrance include broken windows from the sonic boom, and even a
cornfield scorched by a hot meteorite. “It’s very hard to believe,” McCoy
says. “[Meteorites] never hit the ground as fireballs. They are 10 miles
above the Earth when firey. They fall slowly, a couple of hundred miles
per hour, through cool air. By the time they hit the ground, they’re cold.”

Occasionally, bits of space rock survive the journey
through the atmosphere. Sightings of possible meteorite remains have been
claimed throughout the Northeast, including New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Still the sensible skeptic, McCoy cautions that a meteorite actually lands
less than 50 percent of the time, and even then it’s quite difficult to
predict a landing spot. “Someone’s either going to find a rock or not,”
he says. If you want to hunt for a remnant anyway, MocCoy says to look
for a rock burnt on the outside and light on the inside, possibly containing
metallic fragments.

McCoy also mentioned a similar incident from Peekskill,
N.Y. in October of 1992. In that case, a hole in the trunk of 1980 Chevrolet
Malibu was chalked up to random violence, until a 27.3-pound meteorite
was discovered underneath the car.